Book Report: “Lincoln’s Virtues”

My reading on this trip has been “Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography,” by William Lee Miller. Don’t be put off by the Parson Weems-ish title. This book is full of life, to say nothing of intellectual excitement and moral subtlety. It’s a narrative study of the development of Lincoln’s thinking about the nexus of slavery and politics. It gets my highest rating, four H’s, awarded to that rare book that I’m essentially never more than a few feet away from—a book that goes from bedside table to briefcase and back to bedside table again (and accompanies me on trips to the facilities)—every single day from when I start reading it till I’ve finished it.

Miller, a fluid writer and a master historian, has a knack for finding angles on the past that light up vistas that some readers (e.g., me) hardly knew existed. His wonderful “Arguing About Slavery” (1996), which stars the post-Presidential John Quincy Adams, is the story of the pre-Civil War debates in (and around) Congress about slavery—or, rather, the non-debates, since the Slave Power was so politically dominant that it was mostly able to prevent the people’s representatives (if not the people themselves) from even bringing the subject up.

“Lincoln’s Virtues,” a close examination of the great man’s moral development from adolescence through his rise to the White House, focusses almost entirely on what he wrote and read. Does that sound dry? Believe me, it isn’t. “Virtues” was published in 2003. I can’t wait to read Miller’s follow-up volume, “President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman” (2008).

P.S. A couple of Obama-related notes prompted by the book.

Miller writes (page 391):

Abraham Lincoln is unusual, perhaps unique, in that while being nominated entirely out of a political background, he had no national experience except that now ancient one term in Congress, no statewide victories at all, no executive experience at all, no appointments to high-level positions at all.

“Perhaps unique,” but perhaps not.

From Miller’s account (page 396) of the Lincoln campaign’s maneuverings for the 1860 Republican nomination:

When the convention postponed voting from Thursday until Friday, the Lincoln managers printed a large supply of extra tickets, forged official signatures, spent the night rousing Lincoln supporters, packed the hall—a trick, a Lincoln supporter said with local pride, “known only in wicked Chicago.”

Chicago politics. Shocking.

Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker. He regularly blogs about politics.